least voluntary migration, required a minimum amount of cunning, craft,
and capital, which the poor did not have. But the appalling poverty all
around them must have deeply influenced the marginally better-off who
made up the bulk of the nearly half million eighteenth-century emigrants to
the Western Hemisphere: even relatively affluent artisans must daily have
peered over the edge of the abyss into which they knew they could easily
tumble as a result of sickness, accident, or bad luck.
One of the arguments for colonialism Richard Hakluyt made to Queen
Elizabeth was that enforced migration would rid the country of the “great
number of men which do now live idely at home, and are burthenous,
chargeable, & unprofitable to this realme.” Parliament opened the abyss,
sweeping into it a wide variety of the poor: beggars, out-of-work sailors and
laborers, street entertainers, peddlers, tinkerers, crippled army veterans,
and “counterfayte Egipcians.” All these were “to be stripped to the waist”
and whipped until bloody, and then sent to their birthplace or place of last
residence or to a house of correction for a year. They could then be ban-
ished. The mouth of the abyss was wide, and slipping into it was very easy.
For abandoned children, falling into the abyss was inevitable. The
streets of London swarmed with bands of such children; they were the sur-
vivors. Most others died. Some were captured; if guilty of a crime, they
were hanged; if not known criminals, they were placed in workhouses or
hired out to factories. Some were no more than four years old. Still, they
proliferated. In 1617, to try to get rid of as many as possible, the lord mayor
of London collected charitable contributions to send 100 poor children to
Virginia. They were followed by other groups: about 1,400 were rounded
up and “transported” that same year. Other groups followed in 1620,
1622, and 1627, when “fourteen or fifteen hundred children gathered up
from divers places were being sent to Virginia.”
For London’s poor each new day could bring starvation, sickness, or
death. Gin was one release. Another escape was crime. Crime was so
broadly defined that it was, literally, a way of life. When the numbers got
too high, pressure on the “criminal class” was sometimes slightly lifted. For
example, town officials in Bristol reported that “the poor of our city were
all relieved and kept from starving or rising.” “Or rising” are the key words.
In 1671, the duke of Albemarle wrote a memorandum on how to prevent
Society and Wars in the Old Countries 71